mplayer cause it works best for all my pr0n :D
Xine is runner-up for DVD because of it;s versatility in that area (DVD ISOs via loopback is kickass)

Mplayer, thanks to mplayer for all those codecs. .wma .wmv .mov .mp4 .mpeg .mp3

I still prefure Real for .rm .rma

Wrong choice of competitors
 

It is a wrong decision to do not include kaffeine. Just take a look at how many people use it and are saying this in the comments. A lot of them are voting xine, but i want to vote in the program that i use, and this is kaffeine. If it is a frontend or not, doesnt matter, because thats what i use. And a lot of programs in Linux use the power of command line tools, even the competitors are just frontends to low level libraries.

I really do not agree, and the results wont be accurate. If it is easy to turn a program in a backend of another program, than this is a victory for open source.

P.S. I am not involved with kaffeine in any way :)

Mplayer with a little konsole frontend of mine :)

Wheres Kaffeine? :(. Its the only player which I could get to play the TV card. Its the only player I use for DVD's, and almost any video playback.

Well, I voted xine, as kaffeine uses xine as its back end.

The player is great.

I was doubtious about Xine, MPlayer and VLC. Each has its uses, and I use each of them for different tasks.

Xine's a superb multipurpose video player, you don't like the frontend, try totem-xine which totally rocks too. It also supports all the codecs that MPlayer does, so that's a non-issue (through the win32codecs package).

MPlayer is a good general purpose video and media player, but where it really excels is when used as a plugin for Firefox... Simply unbeatable!

VLC is the best for Win32 compatibility, it actually includes support for such formats as matroska video that neither Xine nor MPlayer do (at least not on my system).

However, I use Xine most of the time. I like it better than Mplayer in the front-end (and control) and I don't have a real need to use VLC except for thos files I can't see with neither Xine or MPlayer.

Maybe for Multimedia applications next year we should differenciate? I mean xine, Mplayer, VLC, Ogle, etc, are players; Kino, AVIDemux, etc are editors; Amarok, Rhythmbox, BMP, XMMS, etc, are audio players; Audacity, TOX, ReZound, etc, are editors... And there's the issue of the media suites like Cinelerra or Blender... Maybe a differentiation of players/content creation tools would be best?

MPlayer: the Best

I've used a quite a lot of media players (both Windows and Linux). After all of these years of media playing experience I've come to use only MPlayer on both Linux and on Windows (when I'm bound to use it). I don't fancy the GUI. Just the pure mplayer is the one for me. Blazingly fast, plays almost anything, can be operated totally with the keyboard, simple and etc.

Not to mentioned I've made quite a few dedicated Windows desktop users (basically with high media expectations) true MPlayer fans. They even love when their friends go 360 degree spin when double click opens a command prompt and a playback box with no GUI components (controls).

Ogle, totem and Xine are also good. But MPlayer is simply or probably the best on both Linux and Windows. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

vlc! it plays everything, and you don't have to mess around and download a kajillion codecs for it to work. install one thing and your done!

Xine for me. I can't stand mplayer. Bad DVD-support, buggy and the programmers demand that you use the same gcc version as theirs in order to build mplayer. The skin integration is not very good either. While it's cool to play movies using the command line (and arguably faster), it's just a pain when you play a DVD with subs and/or that has multiples languages.

MPlayer is not a bad player overall, I just happen to disagree with it's philosophy :). Looks and feels hobby-ish at best(for me), while Xine is on par with Pro applications, as PowerDVD, for example.

Not to be devil's advocate here, but just as MPlayer, Xine is a backend which can use multiple frontends, in that sense, no different from gstreamer. I agree with you, though, that the GUI part of Xine (xine-ui) is a tad better and the backend support is good, though MPlayer still rocks for subtitles with standalone files (you can edit your own subs for say, an .avi file). Xine also supports this, but to a lesser extent than MPlayer (IMO).

true dat

There are countless amounts of amazing features for mplayer.

Definitely MPlayer